For homeless, a place of last resort in Worcester

Wednesday

Dec 23, 2015 at 5:01 AM

The walls have to be repainted every three months, and the floor is scuffed beyond recognition after less than three years, the result of heavy traffic at the Greater Worcester Housing Connection Triage and Assessment Center – better known as the only homeless shelter in the Worcester area that accepts people regardless of intoxication, drug addiction or other issues.

The South Middlesex Opportunity Council, or SMOC as it is called, runs the shelter, and helps “clients” by offering housing services in a variety of cities and towns in the region.

The shelter, according to GWHC Director Jayde Campbell, was just the first step in a larger overall mission. Campbell took a Worcester Magazine reporter and photographer on a tour of the facility at 25 Queen St., during a time of year when cold weather starts to sweep the region and the shelter is flooded with more and more people.

“Think of us here as the tip of a larger iceberg,” Campbell said. “We are, at our core, a rapid rehousing program.”

Campbell claims a few extraordinary statistics that may contradict what Worcester residents think about the Triage Center. For one, he said, it is rare that someone stays at the shelter for too long – 97.5 percent of people who come in are out within 90 days, he said.

“We view homelessness as a housing crisis that needs to be solved as quickly as possible,” Campbell said. “And we do that. On average, we’re placing people in less than 17 days … We can’t control how many people come to our front door, but what we can do is we can house them as quickly as possible. We view the idea of housing as healthcare.”

That quick turnaround time accounts for how SMOC can serve what Campbell estimated as nearly 1,500 annual unique visitors at the Queen Street location. While the rooming house license lists 25 beds, during the winter Campbell and his staff lay out mats and move people into overflow space in the dining area to make sure no one freezes to death.

“They’re much more comfortable than they look,” Campbell said of the FEMA-approved sleeping mats. “I saw the mat, and thought it looked thin, so I laid on it for half an hour to make sure it was something I would sleep on.”

The shelter is hardly the Ritz, but it is not a warehouse either; and it is a far cry from the former People In Peril shelter on Main Street, which housed more people, but was also viewed as a trouble spot in an area of the city known for drug and other illegal activity.

In the new shelter, there is a contained smoking area abutting the dining area for clients who smoke. In addition to men’s and women’s dormitories, there is a separate room for clients who work late and may have to violate the 6 p.m. curfew. A few clients played cards at a dining table while Campbell explained what happens during the day.

“One of the things that’s constantly a confusion in the community is there’s an assumption we put people out in the morning and don’t let them back until the evening,” Campbell said.

That is something clients have told Worcester Magazine in the past. Each and every client, Campbell said, gets a case manager who helps them to get back to self-sufficiency.

“We give everybody a schedule, and say, what are three things you need to do today to end your homeless episode? We want to get people inspired every morning to get doing this,” he said. “If something is on their schedule and they’re not doing it, we’ll say, hey, you have to do this, what’s the barrier? It’s a way for us to have a quick feedback loop.”

Unlike other shelters in the area — and the Ritz — there are no requirements to stay at the Triage Center, aside from obvious behavioral expectations. Assaulting other clients or staff will get someone kicked out, but since the Triage Center is a “wet shelter” it takes everyone who comes. A sign referencing “K2” synthetic marijuana hung on a door to a room for holding medication and cash, things that are not allowed into the dormitories at large. Drug paraphernalia is confiscated, but for an intoxicated resident, the Triage Center is the only place in town where he or she will be welcomed with a warm bed. The restrictions by other shelters, Campbell said, have even caused the demographics of the Triage Center to change.

“The opiate crisis is an equal opportunity crisis for gender,” Campbell, who has worked for SMOC since 2006 and was the director of the PIP shelter as well starting in 2011, said. “Frankly, the eligibility requirements for family shelters have been tightened. We’re seeing people we wouldn’t normally see. For example, pregnant women are here more often.”

“Our historical average is about 80 percent men and 20 percent women,” he continued. “There has been an increasing amount of women as a proportion of our entire population over the last two or three years. The 30-plus years of data we had [from the PIP shelter] said it would be around 17 percent. Right now it’s between 30 and 40 percent.”

The percent of shelter clients under the age of 25 is also increasing.

“That represents between 10 and 11 percent of our population,” Campbell said. “That’s dramatically higher than three or five years ago. If we saw someone come in that was under 25 at [the PIP shelter], we would be like, ‘Oh my goodness, how do we get them out of this environment as quickly as possible?’”

The Triage Center serves three meals per day, 365 days per year. Campbell said 40 percent of that food comes from food banks, and the rest comes from restaurant donations or from his modest budget.

Still, residents have some gripes. One of the biggest is their entire life must fit in one bin in a closet. For some, who could be coming from eviction or foreclosure rather than a life on the street, that can be an issue, but Campbell said there is nothing his staff can do.

“We don’t have enough space here to have people bring in lots of items,” Campbell said. “When people come in, we assign them a bin. We can’t store somebody’s apartment.”

Other details people in the community may not know about the Triage Center? While half the people coming in have no cash income, even the average income of between $303 and $760 per month — which could combine welfare payments and social security — is not enough to afford monthly rent in Worcester, which could be more than $500, leaving very little for food and other expenses.

Although Campbell keeps abreast of incidents such as fires in the community, he said the shelter often does not see people from those events until weeks or months after they lose their home, and half his clients leave within seven days.

“Because of perceptions in the community, because people are social animals who have connections with family and friends, what we see is those people use and exhaust those resources before they come here,” Campbell said. “We’re really the place of last resort, when people have run out of every other social connection, every other fiscal connection, that’s when people come in.”

Reporter Tom Quinn can be reached at 508-749-3166 x324 or tquinn@ worcestermagazine.com with story ideas, feedback, or questions. Follow him on Twitter @bytomquinn.